Selecting the Right Authoring Tool for Your Online Training Content

Published: 

Here are a few scenarios for training and which authoring tool would be most appropriate for eLearning development requirements.

Published: 
Selecting the Right Authoring Tool for Your Online Training Content

Here are a few typical scenarios for training and let’s see which authoring tool would be most appropriate for eLearning development in such situations.

Scenario 1:

A Product Manager says “I want product training for my sales team. And NOW!”

Scenario 2:

A Compliance Manager says “We need compliance training rolled out globally in 13 languages in a month. Is it even possible?”

Scenario 3:

A Director of HR says “My team has lots of content in PPTs. We need to convert this to online courses immediately. But HOW?”

Scenario 4:

A Training Manager says “I need to get my in-house developer team trained on course development as a huge and complicated requirement is coming up. Any suggestions?”

Selecting the Right Authoring Tool for Your Online Training Content

Here is a quick look at when to use which tool:

ScenarioNeedSolution
1
  • Quick product launch/training has to precede product launch
  • Light content, standard design, without complex interactivity, Team mostly trainers
Articulate
2
  • Mandatory legal training, mostly text-heavy content
  • Need quick translations
  • Highly customizable, interactive content, team mostly IDs
Lectora
3
  • Need application training
Captivate
4
  • Highly customizable, interactive content, team mostly IDs and developers
Flash

Before selecting the tool for your elearning content development needs, think about what you have at your disposal in terms of the composition of the team and available skill sets. Think about your constraints in terms of nature of content, multilingual requirements and available development time. It’s important to think about what you’re trying to accomplish – your training requirement.

E-learning Development Outsourcing: A Comprehensive eGuide to Select the Right Vendor

Recent Comments

  • 8/13/2011 at 6:45 pm

    Informative article. I may add a fifth scenario:
    A Training Manager wants his employees to learn new skills and their progress must be tracked and stored. Which tool is the most appropriate for such scenario? Definitely Flash. Even though the other tools can do the job, but they are very limited compared to Flash. The other tools pack the whole course in one SCO preventing them from making use of the Rollup and Sequencing Rules of SCORM 2004. If the objective is to create adaptive content (using Rollup and Sequencing), content developers MUST create separate SCOs since Rollup and Sequencing Rules operate only on an Activity Tree and they are useless if used with a single SCO.

  • 8/13/2011 at 7:55 pm

    Just to be sure to understand Fadel, “Flash” is a software? could you tell from which developer? Thanks!

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